Under pressure from the White House coronavirus task force, the CDC revised testing guidelines for COVID-19 to not recommend testing for people who had been exposed to the virus, but were asymptomatic. Not only does this go against the vast majority of scientific evidence on mitigating the spread of COVID-19 that we've heard so far, it was also done while director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, was undergoing surgery and unavailable to give input.
"I was under general anesthesia in the operating room and was not part of any discussion or deliberation regarding the new testing recommendations," Fauci told CNN. "I am concerned about the interpretation of these recommendations and worried it will give people the incorrect assumption that asymptomatic spread is not of great concern. In fact it is."
Also concerned is Pixies frontman Black Francis. He's taken to Twitter to blast the policy change, and those responsible. "So if it is inefficient to test an aymptomatic contact soon after exposure because you might get a false negative," he tweeted at the CDC, "shouldn't the guidelines advise to get tested a few days later instead of not at all?"